Skin irregularities are commonly treated by physical manipulation of the surface and the underlying tissue of the skin. For example, it is believed and therefore practiced that massage therapy reduces the pocketing and wrinkling of the surface texture of the skin.
In actuality, this belief is partly well founded but the result is not only temporary but also short lived. The short life of improvement is due to the fact that improvement is caused by edema. Acute response to physical agitation of skin is often manifested as edema, which is localized swelling that inflates the tissues of the skin and yields a temporary skin smoothing. This acute tissue response abates in a short period of time. However, perception of massage-type therapies is positive because of the legitimate immediate and visible results that the massage recipient witnesses.
One of the most common irregularities in the surface of the skin, predominantly in women, is what is referred to popularly as cellulite. Cellulite is the dimpling and pocketing of the skin and in the skin, particularly in the buttocks and posterior upper thighs.
The morphology of the tissue that causes the pocketing and dimpling of skin in cellulite was long believed to be accumulation of fat tissue under the skin. Consequently many treatments have been developed that reduce the fat content beneath the surface of the skin. These treatments reduce fat volume and the general contour of the skin but do not address the specific underlying causes of the dimpling.
For example, one of the leading treatments for cellulite reduction today is surgical liposuction. Liposuction is effective in reducing fat volume but often aggravates the dimpling and actually sometimes reduces the visual appeal of the surface of the skin. In fact, this leading treatment, widely thought to ameliorate cellulite, actually aggravates skin dimpling.
The underlying cause of the dimpling of the skin is localized inflation of the fat cells with the coincident contraction of the connective tissue distributed amidst and surrounding the fat cells. The dimpling is an aggregate response to a distributed cellular-level tensegrity field. (Tensegrity is to be understood as a characteristic property of a stable three-dimensional structure consisting of members under tension that are contiguous and members under compression that are separated by the former.) In the cellulite condition, cell membranes and connective tissue shrink relative to adjacent fat cells. In summary, the manifestation known as cellulite is not a bulging of fat outward but a tugging of connective tissue inward in localized areas. The connective tissue that causes the contractions is located about 1-2 mm below the surface of the skin.
Methods to treat the tissue below the skin without affecting the surface of the skin have been developed. One such technology is High Frequency Focused Ultrasound (HFFU). HFFU attempts to induce a stress field below the surface of the skin while simultaneously preventing injury to the skin surface. HFFU utilizes a geometric low energy acoustic field projected through tissue and a medium that is focused at a point or line below the surface of the skin. The physical shape of the projector or the phasing of elements of the projector array provides the required stress field direction and amplification. In this technology, resonance is not employed. The effect is highly localized, but it often projects energy too deep into the tissue to provoke a useful tissue response.
It is therefore an object of this invention to provide an improved method of treating the true condition that underlies cellulite. It is a further object of the invention to provide a method of using ultrasound that reliably improves the condition of subcutaneous tissue, thereby alleviating or eliminating the cellulite condition. It is yet a further object of this invention to accomplish improvement of the cellulite condition by providing a resonant ultrasound field.